Artful Postcards

Postcards illustrated by Sheri42 in arrowleaf balsamroot motifs — Postcards with my arrowleaf balsamroot motifs and pattern

Inspiration

Long ago in 2013 I participated in a huge online class called a MOOC. This particular one was different– it was collaborative: CLmooc– Connected Learning Massive Open Online Collaboration. It was truly “an open, collaborative, knowledge-building learning and sharing experience,” as the tagline of the CLmooc website states.

Many of the participants still gather online to collaborate. This year we created a 2024 calendar you can download here.

This week I received a postcard from Karen— a delightful postcard highlighting White Sands National Park– themed Starry Nights.

Postcard from Karen, themed Starry Nights at the White Sands National Park; one of several such Starry Night postcards

Last week, Wendy reached out to me about another collaboration, part of our group’s continued “postcard” events. We’ve a Google Doc to sign up to occasionally send and/or receive a postcard. In 2022, our theme was “Postcards for Peace” in support of Ukraine.

Wendy and Sarah thought we should make it collaborative: create a Google Slides to create postcards to share for downloading and printing. It’s not ready yet, but that’s what I’ve been working on today.

Our communication is usually in Slack, the free version. But I noticed today that Slack hides past work after 90 days, unless you go Pro. Imagine all the collaborative conversations and images we have lost since we started in Slack in 2018? I’ve found an alternative, though: Pumble.

Today’s Art

So my art today was to create postcards with my art as examples. You can see them in at the top.

I also fiddled with formatting the slides so they would be the size of postcards that fit the template by Avery– Matte White Postcards #8387. At that website, download for your platform: Adobe, Word, Pages. The Adobe Photoshop work with Affinity [psd].

That’s when I discovered that Google Slides image downloads are not high quality. It actually works better to down load a pdf, delete the slides you don’t want, and then for the slide you want as a postcard, export it as a png image. I found the quality better if you have small text like I did. But if the image is not fine print, but more like the bold, “Hello,” then the “download as image” works.

That’s It

That’s it for my art today. A little research and a little art placement. If we get it up and running, I’ll post about it. Meanwhile, download our calendar for this year — it’s totally free, no signup– and maybe join our postcard group [info here]. Most important: make art.